ePOWER TIP: (full story)
How To Be SPAM Free (Almost) ...It is 5:30 am
January 13, 2003, the morning of a new day and I've
already received 67 unwanted e-mails! The good news is I
only had to look at seven of them. If you
are like me and hate spam with a passion, then
here is a strategy to make the e-mail side of your
life much, much more pleasant (and productive!)
I have found that it takes at least two spam
filters working together to successfully eliminate
most of my unwanted e-mail. Here is how my
strategy works:
- Spaminator - I first forward all my
e-mail to my unpublished Earthlink address with
"Spaminator" turned on. This is a free
service provided by Earthlink that eliminates a
great deal of spam before I ever have to look at
it. For example, just for this one
(typical) day Spaminator caught a total of
164 spam messages! And none of
these were "false positives" (i.e. messages that
should have gone through but were inadvertently
tagged as spam).
However, as good as this sounds, it missed
another 83 that got through. That's
right, on a typical day I receive nearly
250 spam messages!!! (and you thought
yours was bad!). To take care of the
rest, I use another filter that plugs right into
my Outlook software...
- iHateSpam - available through
SunBelt Software, is a very affordable and
easy to use anti-spam plug-in for Outlook 2000,
XP (or later). Once it is set up, it does
a great job of filtering out unwanted e-mail
using self-updating spam filters that
automatically download from the Net. Like Spaminator, it does let you view the messages it
tagged as spam —which is a good thing because
it will at times confuse the e-mail you want to
receive with spam.
Of the 83 spam messages that Spaminator didn't
catch, iHateSpam caught all but 10 of them.
This one-two punch seems to work well when you
consider that about 97% of my total spam was
eliminated with little effort on my part.
Spam is truly the scourge of the Net. In
addition to being costly and time consuming, it
takes a lot of the joy away from using e-mail.
Until we can figure a way to strongly discourage
it with laws that have teeth to sink into the
perpetrators, this problem will continue to grow. However, at least now you have a way to make it
disappear —most of it anyway. |
